This time he afterward got out of bed and paced about the small
room, stretching, flexing, rolling his head like a pugilist, briefly massaging one hand and then the other. He drained the last of the bottle and set
it on the dresser. The light was behind him and she could not see his face.
“Hoy mismo maté trescientos pinches Colorados.” He turned his
gaze to the dark window. “Pues, puede ser que los maté ayer. Los días
pasan.” He looked at her again. “Pasan a la memoria y la historia, los
más enormes museos de mentiras.”
She stared at him in utter incomprehension. He stepped to the
chair where his clothes were draped and from them extracted a pair of
revolvers. She’d had no notion of their presence.
“Los maté con éstas.” He twirled the pistols on his fingers like a
shooter in a Wild West show, then put one of them back into the
coat. He held up three fingers of his free hand. “Tres
cientos
. Los maté
todos.” He struck his chest. “
Yo ,
Fierro!”
She understood of this only the number three and what might be
his name and that whatever he was telling her was attached to a ferocious pride.
Fierro, a su servicio, mi angelita.”
“Rodolfo,” she said, testing the name on her tongue.
“Para algunos mi nombre es una canción tambien, como tuyo.
Pero el mió es una canción de muerte.”
“Muerte,” she said. “I know that one. Death.”
“Si—death.” He laughed low. “Tienes miedo de la muerte?
He stepped up beside the bed and raised the revolver so that the
muzzle was within inches of her face. He slowly cocked the hammer
and she heard the ratchet action as the cylinder rotated and even in
the weak light she could see the bluntly indifferent bulletheads riding in their chambers.
Her breath caught. Her nipples tightened. Her blood sped.
She reached up and gingerly fingered the barrel. Then drew it
closer, breathing its masculine smells of oiled gunmetal and burnt
powder. And put her tonguetip to the muzzle and tasted of its taint.
She could hear her own hard breathing.
His teeth showed. “Otra loca brava.”
She tried to disengage the pistol from his hand, which felt as much
of iron as the weapon itself. He uncocked it and released it to her.
The metal frame was impressed with the Colt symbol and the
grips were pale yellow and each was embossed with an eagle holding
a snake in its beak.
“I want it.”
“La quieres?”
He seized her mouth in his hard fingers. She was unsure if he
meant to kiss her or hit her or do something she could not begin to
imagine. With an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed she pressed
the Colt against his stomach and cocked the hammer.
He chuckled—then kissed her deeply. She slid the gun down his
belly to his phallus and found it standing rigid and they broke the
kiss in laughter.
“Christ Jesus, I aint the only one loco,” she said. She eased down
the hammer as she had seen him do.
He made an expansive gesture of relinquishment. “Te la doy,
güerita. Como un... pressen.”
“A
present
?” She giggled happily and slipped the gun under the
pillow as he got on the bed and positioned himself above her, his grin
white, black eyes glowing.
“Wait,” she said. “Momento.”
She could not have said then or ever after why she did what she
next did. It was as if something of the man’s blood was calling to
hers—some atavistic urge as primitive as a wolf howl—and she could
not deny its pull, her own blood’s yearn to join with his. In that
moment of primal impulse, she probed into herself and extracted her
pessary and slung it away.
He chuckled as at some comic mummery. “Y mas loca todavía.”
And entered her.
r. Marceau is a bespectacled man with a neatly trimmed gray
beard and the polite but reserved manner of a distant uncle.
The most lucrative portion of his practice comes from clients who
share the need of his discretion and his willingness to help women
beset by an age-old trouble consequent of reckless passion.
He regards the girl seated across the desk from him and shows her a
small practiced smile bespeaking sympathetic understanding. His long experience has taught him to recognize the demimondaines even when they
do not honestly identify themselves but assume some tired guise to preserve
an illusion of dignity. Besides, the fallen ones of good family rarely come to
him unaccompanied. It’s almost always some young pony, green and given
to mistakes, who arrives at his door all alone. Like this one.
“Well, ah... Mrs. Sullivan,” he says, consulting his record sheet.
“It’s definite. The stork is on the wing. And has been for about three
months, as nearly as I can determine.”
She turns to stare out the window, her face revealing nothing of
what she might be thinking. The doctor’s office building is set on a
mountainside overlooking the two cities flanking the river. On this
chilly winter morning the vantage affords a vista beyond a low blue
haze of woodsmoke and past the near sierras and broad Mexican plain
to a jagged line of long dark ranges deep in the distant south.
The doctor removes his eyeglasses and cleans them with a handkerchief, permitting her a moment to ponder the verdict. The situation is
worse for these soiled doves, he has come to believe, than for the innocent ones whose sin was to love too dearly some charming rogue who
then abandoned them to the fates. He knows how abruptly some of
these young cyprians can collapse into tears, their circumstance all at
once an irrefutable testament to their ruined lives, to their far remove
from the world’s respect, from the future they had envisioned in a
childhood only a few years past but seeming as distant as ancient history. The doctor prides himself on a certain finesse on these occasions.
He has found that the whole matter was usually somewhat mitigated if
he was the one to broach the solution to the problem rather than oblige
them to tender the request. He sets the spectacles back on his face and
rests his elbows on the desk and stares at the laced fingers of his hands
like someone who has forgotten everything of prayer but its posture.
The girl continues to stare out the window.
“Ah, Mrs.... Sullivan. I know very well that in some instances—more
prevalent than one might think, I assure you—such news as this is not especially gladsome. There are, after all, any number of reasons why a young
woman might not be fully prepared for, ah, such a medical condition. Perfectly understandable reasons. Reasons she need not feel compelled to explain to anyone. And because the, ah, condition may be remedied by a
rather simple procedure, a procedure in which I am very well—”
He is startled by the sudden look she fixes on him, blue eyes
sparking, her aspect bright.
“I’m sorry,” she says—and it takes him a second to understand that
she is apologizing for her distraction. “I only came to be sure.”
She rises from her chair. “Maybe I’ll be back. Maybe not.”
She goes to the door and stands there until he overcomes his befuddlement and hastens forward to open it for her. She smiles and
bids him good day.
Cullen Youngblood’s smile is small.
“Be damn if I don’t about believe you’re serious.”
“That I am,” Youngblood says. He sips of his drink.
“I damn well can’t believe it.”
“If you believe it or not doesn’t change a hair on the fact of it,”
Youngblood says. He catches the bartender’s attention and signals for
another round.
“Christ sake, bud.”
“I know,” Youngblood says.
“Bad enough to want to get married, but... well, goddam, aint
there no decent women?”
“She’s plenty decent.”
“Hell, man, she’s a whore is what she is.”
“Not anymore. Come next week she’ll be Mrs. Cullen Youngblood, so don’t go saying anything ungentlemanly about her or I’ll be
obliged to kick your ass.”
“Shit. There’s no end to your pitiful illusions.”
“You might try congratulating me like a friend ought.”
“I ought have you locked up in the crazyhouse till you get your
right sense back, what I ought.”
The bartender brings the fresh drinks to the end of the bar where
they stand. Double bourbons with branch. Hartung picks up his and
drinks half of it at a gulp.
“Christ sake, bud.”
“I aint the first to do it. I known others to do it.”
“Me too. Larry McGuane married one used to work in that house
in Fort Stockton. They weren’t married a month when he caught her
at it with a neighbor boy.”
“That one of McGuane’s—”
“He whipped her ass bloody and she swore to him she’d never
again. Thought he’d straightened her right out. Coupla days after, she
cooks him a big fine dinner to show what a good wife she’s gonna be.
Half hour later he’s near to dying of the poison. He just did get himself to Doc Wesson in time. Meanwhile she’s burning down his house
and emptying the jar of greenbacks he kept buried behind the stable
and thought she didn’t know nothing about. Took her leave on the
midnight train. That was what, five, six years ago. You seen him
lately? Looks like a old man. Living with his aunt and uncle. His
stomach aint never been right since. Yeah, I known some to do it.”
“That one was crazy to begin with and everybody knew it.
McGuane knew what she was like, he just didn’t have no caution nor
a lick of sense. He always was a damn fool with women.”
“I wouldn’t be calling nobody crazy nor a damn fool neither, I was
you,” Hartung says. “Forty-five-year-old man.”
“They aint all like McGuane’s. Jessup Jerome married his Louisa
out of Miss Hattie’s in San Angelo. Been twenty-some years and a
dozen kids. A man couldn’t ask for a better wife.”
“One in a damn thousand,” Hartung says. He drains the rest of his
drink.
“It aint that uncommon. I had a old uncle used to say they make
the best wives because it means more to them after working in the
trade. They got a better appreciation, he said.”
“That uncle sounds loony as you. Must run in the family.”
Hartung catches the bartender’s eye and makes a circular motion
with his finger over the bartop.
“Everybody thought it was a joke,” he says. “You asking and asking and her steady saying no. Even Miz O’Malley thought you were
only funning.”
They have been friends, these two, since their boyhood in Presidio
County, whose westernmost corner lies 150 miles downriver of the saloon where they now stand. Youngblood has owned the YB Ranch in
Presidio since shortly after his father suffered a severe stroke fifteen
years ago. Unable to walk or get on a horse or speak a coherent word,
reduced to communicating by means of a small slateboard he wore
around his neck, the old man endured his crippled state for four
months before writing
DAMN THIS
! on his slate and shooting himself
through the head. Youngblood couldn’t blame him, but the loss was
the last one left to him in the family. His elder brother Teddy had
been killed at age eighteen in an alley fight in Alpine, and his little
brother James, whose birth their mother had not survived, was twelve
when he drowned in the Rio Grande.
Hartung’s daddy had died two years prior to Youngblood’s. The
man was badly given to drink and one night on his way home from
the saloon he stood up to piss from the moving wagon and lost his
balance and fell out and broke his neck. He left the family so deeply
in debt they’d had to sell their ranch, which neighbored the Youngblood place. Frank’s mother and sister moved to Amarillo to live with
relatives, but Frank chose to go work on his uncle’s ranch near Las
Cruces, New Mexico, some forty miles north of El Paso. The uncle
was a childless widower and happy to take him in. When he died not
long after, he left the place to Frank.
For more than ten years now Hartung and Youngblood have been
getting together in El Paso once a month or so for a Saturday-night
romp. Their usual procedure on these rendezvous is to take rooms at
the Sheldon Hotel, dine at a fine restaurant, do a bit of drinking in
various of the livelier saloons, and then cap the evening with a visit
to Mrs. O’Malley’s. They have on occasion arrived at her door in battered disarray, having obliged hardcases spoiling for a barroom fight,
and she has in every such instance refused them admission until they
first went to the pump shed at the rear of the house to wash the blood
off their faces and tidy themselves somewhat. They can still get a
laugh from each other with the recollection of the time she said they
were too disorderly to be allowed to come in, and Hartung said, “Too
disorderly
? Hellfire, this is a disorderly house, aint it?”
One Saturday night just three days into the year of 1914 they
met the darkly blond Ava, the “new girl” as Mrs. O’Malley called
her, though by then she had been with the house nearly two
months. Youngblood went upstairs with her and was so thoroughly
smitten that he gladly paid the steeply higher price of staying with
her all night. For the next two weeks he had frequent thoughts of
her as he worked at the ranch, as he tried to read after supper, as he
lay in bed and waited for sleep. The following Saturday he was back
in El Paso and again bought her for the night—and he had returned
every weekend thereafter.
His enjoyment of her went beyond the carnal, was of a sort that
had been absent from his life since age twenty when Connie Duderstadt of Alpine threw him over for a boy of more prosperous family.
In the years since, he has gained much experience with whores and
believes himself no fool about them. This Ava’s interest in his life—
in his descriptions of the YB Ranch and the ruggedly beautiful country surrounding it, in the tales of his adventurous youth and of the
last wild Indians that roamed the region in those days and the Mexican bandits that still did—seemed to him fully genuine. It soon became clear that she knew something of horses and rivers and weather,
that she took as much pleasure in the natural world as he did. When
he asked if Ava was her true name, she said it was, and on his promise to keep it to himself told him her full name was Ava Jane Harrison. She shared in the smile he showed on receiving such intimate
information.
He had of course early on asked the ineluctable question of how
she’d come to be in this business, but her mute stare in response had
carried such chill he did not ask again. Although she steadfastly refused to reveal anything of her own history, he formed an impression
that she’d grown up a solitary child. Her accent carried the softer resonances of the South, though he could place it no more precisely than
that. For all her guardedness, she did let slip a small hint of her past
on the night she asked if he’d ever read Edgar Allan Poe. He had—
and he was delighted to know that she too was a reader. They talked
and talked about Poe’s poetry and such of his stories as “The Fall of
the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Her favorite tale was
“The Imp of the Perverse,” which he had not read. She was fond as